Waterboarding As a Way to Find God

It pleases how major Republican presidential candidates other than John McCain have embraced waterboarding as the answer to our national-security and spiritual ills.

McCain, who endured years of torture from the North Vietnamese, knows that waterboarding is torture. Call waterboarding what you will otherwise, call it a national necessity if you like, it’s still something to tickle old Gestapo agents into breaking into rousing renditions of “The Horst Wesel Song.”'

So far as I can find out, for all their he-man bluster, the only shots Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson have ever seen fired came when a maitre’d put a match to a couple of fingers of brandy on a pudding.

Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, suddenly warriors hot for our torturing captives who might know when the next train leaves, up until recently, before they thought caressing torture would win them a few votes, in their pious ways preached spreading mercy around. Oh, well, mercy is always dear and in short supply and torture always cheap and readily at hand.

The fair thing to do, I think, is for Fox Broadcasting to waterboard Giuliani, Thompson, Romney and Huckabee on national TV, live, all the time asking each what he thinks about torturing prisoners.

All four are accomplished mountebanks and might lie a little, sputter once they start breathing again, that waterboarding is horrible. In that case they should be dipped under again, just to test whether waterboarding indeed produces truth. Huckabee, a Baptist preacher, could always go last and promise to baptize the others while they’re submerged, in case they want to take out a little heavenly life insurance with the Big Guy in the Sky.

It would be a good show, especially if we had a couple of waterboarders from our KGB–excuse me, CIA–do voice-over commentaries about what’s going on and what to expect next: CIA bigshots rushing in to blowtorch the show's tapes. High ratings for that, guaranteed.